Guy Aitchison (London, OK): There is a short article worth reading on the relationship between "Britishness" and "Muslimness" which appears in this month's edition of emel, the "muslim lifestyle magazine". It is written by oD author and former director of City Circle, Yahya Birt. As someone who converted to Islam in later life, Birt is well-placed to offer a unique perspective on the relationship between these two sources of identity and allegiance, so often thought to be in tension with each other. Birt notes that, contrary to popular belief, a large majority of British muslims self-identify as "British" even though patriotism in general is in decline. But recent attempts to define and re-assert "Britishness" in terms of values and institutions are inadequate, he argues. They are too vague and insubstantial and do not speak to our "sense of duty, or emotional attachment, to fellow citizens. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Said Business School has the week released a report based on the Broadcasting Britishness conference, which looked at the role of television and radio in shaping national identity back in June.  As historian Linda Colley noted in her keynote speech at the time, "the reasons why Britishness has come to seem more problematic are in fact many and various." The report's recommendations mainly focus on the need to help ethnic minorities 'strengthen their emotional bond with Britain.' One reason for this is a concern with social cohesion in a post 7/7 environment that was reflected in the contrasting experiences of two Muslim broadcasters at the conference:  Read the rest of this post...

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): You may recall Anthony Barnett having some fun over the summer with a peculiar pamphlet on Britishness written by Liam Byrne, our Minister of State for Borders and Immigration. Byrne's description of his encounter with an "eloquent of lady of Edgbaston", who convinced him that we can learn to live together if only "we put our minds to it", provided the theme for OK's summer limerick competition, which attracted some eloquent entries of its own. The Minister was clearly impressed with her words as they also form the springboard for the discussion of Britishness in his latest pamphlet, A More United Kingdom (pdf), published this week by Demos (it's quite long - you can also hear Byrne talk about the report in this Demos podcast). "In this remark", he says, "you hear captured the strong sense that the time is right for Britain as a country to do more to celebrate the things that we do have in common. A national day would be the perfect way." The idea of a Britishness day was first touted by Byrne in a pamphlet (pdf) for the Fabian Society which he produced with Ruth Kelly. Published as Brown took power last year, it provided an early indication of what one of the central themes of his Governance of Britain agenda - and indeed his premiership - would be. Today, as the Brown agenda crumbles amidst economic disaster and backbench plotting, we have Byrne's latest proposals. They are the product of an eight-week-long journey around the country with his Home Office cohort in which he discussed with the public questions of immigration, identity and belonging. Read the rest of this post...

Alexandra Runswick (Unlock Democracy): The USA has life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. France has liberty, equality and fraternity. What is the equivalent British set of values? Does it matter if we don’t know? Is it somehow un-British to even ask? These were just some of the issues raised in the RSA  and Heritage Lottery Fund lecture Britishness – a values based approach is not enough. The proposed Statement of British Values has been one of the more hotly debated aspects of the Governance of Britain agenda. While there is growing consensus about the need for a Bill of Rights, response to the BSV project as it is apparently known, has been lukewarm at best. Much of the debate has focused on the government’s decision to use a deliberative process, a Citizens' Summit, rather than what values might make it into the statement. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK):  Back in August, Borders and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne provided the theme for our summer limerick competition, when he recalled how "In my conversations around Britain, I met an especially eloquent lady in Edgbaston. She said, ‘We can learn to live together, if we only put our minds to it.’ I think she is right. And I think we should approach this task with an air of great confidence."  Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): OK's summer limerick competition (details here) has reached the halfway mark. There still a week to go until August 30th for anyone who wants to trying their hand at bringing out the latent poetry in Liam Byrne's prose. Here are some of the best entries so far: Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): 'One World, One Dream' is the official slogan of the Beijing Olympics, reflecting "the common wishes of people all over the world, inspired by the Olympic ideals, to strive for a bright future of Mankind. In spite of the differences in colors, languages and races, we share the charm and joy of the Olympic Games, and together we seek for the ideal of Mankind for peace." It has long been argued, (classically by George Orwell), that such lofty ideals only serve to conceal the close relationship between nationalism and the sporting spirit. Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Following my post about the fabulous call to modernity, fraternity and Britishness by Borders and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, we are launching OK's summer limerick competition. The limerick must begin with: "I met an eloquent lady in Edgbaston." and end with: "if we only put our minds to it." As I report, Byrne writes about how he met "an exceptionally eloquent lady from Edgebaston" who convinced him that all we needed to to so sort out Britain for the best is to: "put our minds to it". The Minister describes how he was immediately convinced. The winner will get a free copy of The Athenian Option. Competition closes Saturday, 30th August.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Liam Byrne is the Minister of State for Borders and Immigration. Eloquent and presentable, he is according to the Spectator, tipped to become a Cabinet Minister in next month's reshuffle. He's about to publish a Demos pamphlet on 'Refreshing Fraternity'. A trailer has just been published in this week's Spectator. It makes interesting reading in the context of our debate about Labour After Brown. Byrne's is definitely a Labour With Brown scenario. He attempts by seamless legerdemain to magic Britain into being a nation. He sat through the Prime Minister's IPPR speech on citizenship where Brown hailed the country as a pioneering multi-national entity. Byrne knows the reality, of course. This is how he tries to pilot out of it: Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): The Government's approach to social cohesion has been challenged today in a new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Immigration and Social Cohesion in the UK, by Mary Hickman, Helen Crowley and Nick Mai of London Metropolitan University, questions 'the idea that we need a fixed notion of Britishness and British values'  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Eliza Carthy talks about her new album, how working with corporate music is like trying to breath underwater and tells Alexis Petridis she needs to keep the BNP out of her hair. Is there a coded warning to Paul Kingsnorth in his debate with Vron Ware: "She also admonishes folkies who romanticise "the idyll of the past" ("What bit of the past was good? Slave-based capitalism? Syphilis?"), is disarmingly frank about the difficulties of spending much of her 20-year career working with her parents, and talks passionately about the need for English culture to be supported, before worrying that she sounds like a Daily Mail reader  Read the rest of this post...

This is Vron Ware's reply to Paul Kingsnorth. We will be publishing the entire exchange in one document on oD over the weekend. Vron Ware (London, author): For those who may be reading this, who perhaps haven't come across my work before, I will say this, simply and clearly, without any accusations of who is racist, race-obsessed, stuck in the past and guilt-ridden: My book on Britishness begins with an exploration of what makes people feel at home in this country. It starts with a scene of ordinary life, in a café in Leytonstone, drinking tea with two young-ish British community workers with family origins in Somalia and India. We talk about shops, bars, housing, school and other mundane topics, including their experiences of growing up in the neighbourhood. Although it is debatable whether London fits into this discussion, since it is a world city with about one in three born outside the country, I wanted the conversation to illustrate the complex mixture of ingredients that allow individuals to feel a sense of belonging and connection to any particular place. I was intrigued by what Leytonstone had to offer as it was a part of London with which I was unfamiliar. When someone says they take being British for granted, but are proud to be from Leytonstone, it makes you curious. Later in the same chapter I describe how I asked a young woman whose parents were from Pakistan whether she preferred Oxford, where she had been born, to Banbury, where she moved as a child. I listened to her talking about her experiences of growing up in Banbury, a very English place to which she was very attached partly because her parents still lived there. The fact that we had this conversation in Pakistan, where she was visiting relatives (including a cousin who had grown up in the UK and gone back to live in Rawalpindi) was largely incidental. I included it in my book as I thought it reflected a confident, transnational identification with two countries, strongly rooted in a particular place, but strengthened by an awareness of the family history outside it that had taken her there. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): The role of the BBC and other public service broadcasters in promoting national identity has been much discussed in recent weeks, with reports on the issue coming from the BBC Trust and the IPPR. In a keynote speech to the Broadcasting Britishness? conference in Oxford on Tuesday, distinguished historian Linda Colley suggested that this emphasis on the media may be letting politicians off the hook: "Whatever role you determine the national broadcast media can and should play in fostering national and social cohesion, I suspect that at base these are political issues that require political solutions," she argued. It's very easy for the Government to lead culture bodies which require Government funding. It's very much harder for a British government to take its own inititiatives to devise say a new written constitution that might give people in these islands a much stronger sense of common citizenship, or to legislate say a common curriculum in British history and citizenship in all four parts of the UK. Arguably such expedients are necessary, but it is only the politicians who are going to be able to do this. Read the rest of this post...

Lord Taylor of Warwick has called a debate on  ”the concept of Britishness in the context of the cultural, historical and ethical tradition of the peoples of these islands” The debate is expected to start around 11am and you can watch it live here.     Read the rest of this post...

This is the second part of an exchange on national identity and belonging sparked by Paul Kingsnorth's review of Vron Ware's book. We will be publishing Vron's reply tomorrow. Paul Kingsnorth (Oxford, author): My recent review of Vron Ware's book Who cares about Britishness? has evidently upset the author. I can't deny a twinge of guilt: as a fellow writer, I know the frustration of a bad review, and the things it can make you say. So I'm not surprised to read Vron's retaliation about me, my review and indeed my own book, Real England, on OurKingdom. I don’t respond from pique, but because this is, at heart, a crucial debate about the future of England and Britain, and about two competing understandings of what constitutes 'belonging.' More than anything else, perhaps, it is about how that dread term 'multiculturalism' has, in my view, undermined a shared sense of community in both England and Britain, and continues to do so. Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There is a strong and withering analysis of the "dismal redesign" of The Times by Roy Greenslade in last night's Evening Standard (not available online). I think it has more than commercial significance. The Times was once known as the thundering lion whose roar for the gentleman's empire was respected (ie loved or hated) around the world. The lion has long been dying. I think we can now say it has been terminated. The husk of a newspaper bearing its name may continue. But its role has ceased. As it was the 'Voice of Britain' this has some wider significance. The Times was broken by Rupert Murdoch. It was not so much his ownership of it, as the rapid seepage of his values and those of the Sun. The critical moment was when it bought the so-called Hitler Diaries on the advice of Trevor Roper, who at the last minute changed his mind about their authenticity. The presses were about to roll and Murdoch ordered the business to go ahead, declaring that they were in "the entertainment business". The inner journalist of everyone who worked on the paper, then and since, wilted at that moment. From now on whether a story was true was to be trumped by whether or not it entertained. It was better to run a "good story" than a true but dull one. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): "Britishness quite simply is one of the most important associations that we have," Immigration Minister Liam Byrne told a Progress meeting at the House of Commons last night. "It is a code shaped by history that defines so much about who we are and how we look at the world. There's a historian Vron Ware who puts it like this. She said, 'I think British is easier than English. It's clearly a bit more plural, as it includes the Celtic fringe, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. It seems to accommodate the regional difference.'" That assumption was being tested yesterday by the SNP's challenge to Byrne's proposal for a British National Day on the August Bank Holiday, which is on a different day in Scotland. More surprisingly, if the usually well-informed Benedict Brogan is to be believed, the idea didn't endear the Minister to Gordon Brown either. Nevertheless he insisted,"I myself have become convinced that that final weekend in August, what is in parts of the UK a Bank Holiday already, could become the Great British weekend." It's a debate that Ruth Kelly and I explored last May, and since then I've asked people all over Britain what they thought about the idea of a national day. I'll be candid in some places there was a rejection of this idea, a sense of fatality, a sense that it was all too late, that celebrating Britishness was too hard, and elsewhere there was a traditional British scepticism towards anything that looked like it was sponsored by the authorities. In other places there was concern, frankly about who was going to pick up the bill, but in the groups that I listened to the majority was in a different place. I think a clear majority of people do support the idea of a national day. Byrne noted in passing that "a defence of the union will be absolutely central in politics", but his argument was largely framed in terms of a contribution to the debate about immigration. Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): In his speech to the Constitution Unit's Devolution Conference last week, "The Purpose of the Union", Professor Robert Hazell argued that Britishness should not be defended in terms of values, but in terms of "interests and institutions". It is interesting to look at Robert Hazell's list of institutions that symbolise Britishness. I rather wonder who for. Here is the list: Westminster Parliament The Monarchy  Supreme Court, judiciary, common law BBC, British Council Civil service, armed forces, National Health Service And in civil society  The Church of England, of Scotland and in Wales, and other churches and faith groups  Voluntary organisations, from national welfare bodies like Age Concern and the NSPCC, to specialist bodies like Amnesty or Oxfam. I served on the Commission on the NHS in 2000 with Will Hutton, Allyson Pollock, Conor Gearty and others and we actually asked people in a poll to choose "the most valuable instutions for this country", admittedly from our own list of seven. The NHS, which comes at the tail end of Robert's list, was overwhelmingly the most popular choice, with nearly two thirds (63 per cent) of those polled: Parliament followed on with 12 per cent, then the police (11 per cent), the BBC (4 per cent), the Royal Family (3 per cent) and the Benefits Agency (2 per cent). The police received the most second preferences (44 per cent), followed by the NHS (17 per cent) and Parliament (14 per cent). In the same poll we found strong support for economic and social rights alongside civil and political rights. I mention this because the government and commentators tend to ignore the social aspect of people's sense of "Britishness", belonging and democracy.  Read the rest of this post...

This is a response by Vron Ware to Paul Kingsnorth's review of her book Who Cares About Britishness? in which she sets out the fundamental differences between her approach to national identity and that of Kingsnorth in Real England. Vron Ware (author): I bought Paul Kingsnorth's book Real England a few weeks ago after reading a positive review of it. I was enthusiastic about his project of bringing an anti-globalisation perspective to the destruction of England's distinctive environments as I also feel passionately about this. I have been writing about a particular English locality for ten years now, tracking the impact of global forces on every area of life. I've also been working on and against racism and nationalism, attentive to the past and future relationships between Britain and England. When I read him I realised that there are differences between us. Now, Kingsnorth's mean-spirited and inaccurate review of my book commissioned by the British Council, Who Cares About Britishness? A global view of the national identity debate (Arcadia, 2007) suggests that there is little common ground between us. Rather than just respond to his attack I'd like to assess his whole approach. Kingsnorth employs the well-worn method of identifying the 'Real England' by travelling around the country to document a tale of damage, decline and neglect. The portrait of Englishness that he paints conveys a lament for better times, coupled with a reluctance to protest effectively at the destruction of 'ways of life' and institutions that once developed out of local, English culture. I thought the book would also bring an added dimension, especially since George Monbiot's recommendation on the front cover announces that the book 'helps to shape our view of who we are and who we want to be'. In particular, given his knowledge of the movement inspired by the World Social Forum I hoped he would combine an environmentalist rage with a critique of the racially coded nationalism which is often implicit in this genre of writing about England. Instead, he does not really address the question of who counts as English, and who the 'we' are, talking vaguely of people 'of all backgrounds'. The fact that he is prepared to define himself as a nationalist indicates that he is not interested in connecting his position to a discussion about the future of England as a postcolonial country at ease with itself and alive to the value of a cosmopolitan future. Read the rest of this post...

David (Cambridge, Britology Watch): One of a number of themes that came out in the comments on Anthony Barnett’s First thoughts after Labour’s Debacle, was whether the leader of the opposition is, and whether he himself regards himself as, English or British.  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): This argument by Tim Luckhurst in the Times is a hare that is going to run: any referendum on whether Scotland should leave the Union impacts on everyone in the Union and therefore everyone in the UK should have a vote, that's self-determination for you! It's a "We can't divorce unless we both agree" argument. You used to find this approach it in religious courts that gave men the power the decide if their wives were divorced whatever the civil courts might say. Despite himself Luckhurst flashes the primitivism that lies within his apparent reasonableness: Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Brown can't win the next election. More serious, any democratic reform agenda is now in jeopardy. Brown can't win because the moment of genuine popularity of his first three months of office, when he appeared to be different from Blair, is long gone. That positioning has been shot to pieces not least by himself. From now on he has to fight on his record of continuity. But already the voters have given this the two-fingers. Their verdict could only be reversed by a brilliant economic revival. This seems inconceivable. The heart of New Labour's strategy was the embrace of globalisation as the deliverer of wealth plus Gordon's supposedly robust and prudent management of the economy leading to unrivalled stability as well as growth. Today the UK faces the prospect of an economic downturn, a collapse of the housing market and the inflation of staple commodities. This is the harvest of backing the US model over that of the EU, which Brown orchestrated. At the same time the explosion of the super-wealthy, which is one consequence of this strategy, has fatally undermined Labour's claim to be the party of fairness that is central to its appeal. Brown is doomed. Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I am at the annual conference of the Campaign for an English Parliament gathered in Conway Hall in London. There are less people than I expected, around a hundred and fifty- but it is at last a beautiful spring day. We are just listening at the moment to canon Kenyon Wright who was a key player in the Scottish convention that led to its parliament. You won't succeed if you try to build your case on "grievances" he warns it has to be done on constitutional principles. He noted that Scotland is not hostile to the EU as the previous speaker showed the hall down here most certainly is. Simon Lee spoke earlier and I'll blog about what he said later. Over and above the hall is the ethical principle held by the Conway Hall society: "To thine own self be true".

This is a report from the first in a series of seminars the Rowntree trust is running on issues connected to the governance agenda. The seminar was based on a paper by David Beetham, which is published below. Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): I don't want to find myself mired in the deficiencies of the discussion on "British values" in the July 2007 green paper and in Lord Goldsmith's citizenship review. But briefly - in their different ways both are intrinsically un-British: the green paper is, as David Beetham says in his paper, published with this note, prescriptive and exhortatory; Goldsmith turns to crass symbols, rituals and ceremony on the basis of a "historical narrative" that Beetham expose as partial at best, and false in its essentials.  Worse still, Goldsmith's design is to separate out citizens and non-citizens in pursuit of a narrow concept of citizenship; and his description of the citizen's relationship with the state comes straight out of Leviathan. Wake up, man, our shared values about democracy, human rights, citizenship, society and life have moved on since then! Read the rest of this post...

Article: This paper was discussed at the Rowntree's seminar on governance which Stuart Weir reports on above. David Beetham (Manchester, Democratic Audit): One of Gordon Brown's first acts after becoming Prime Minister in 2007 was to publish a Green Paper with Jack Straw, The Governance of Britain, outlining a "new constitutional settlement" which would "forge a new relationship between government and citizen." Part 4 of this paper, entitled "Britain's future: the citizen and the state," was focused on a set of concerns about what it means to be British, what are the distinctive British values, and what rights and responsibilities people should have as citizens, all of which were argued to be unclear or confused and in need of greater clarification. So, for example, we read: "The Government believes that a clearer definition of citizenship would give people a better sense of their British identity in a globalised world" (sec. 185). "A clearer understanding of the common core of rights and responsibilities that go with British citizenship will help build our sense of shared identity and social cohesion" (193). "It is important to be clearer about what it means to be British, what it means to be part of British society and, crucially, to be resolute in making the point that what comes with that is a set of values which have not just to be shared but also accepted" (195). Read the rest of this post...

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Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Over on his Diary Iain Dale gave me a good thumping for daring to suggest that Thatcherism could be one of the root causes of the epidemic of violence among young people in our country. In the comments Dizzy kicked in too. Perhaps the cruellest of Iain’s barbs is his description of me as “normally rather sensible”. Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have just read Time Magazine's gripping analysis of what is happening in Britain, where young people are now subject to violence and perpetrate violence in ways, and on a scale, not found elsewhere in Europe.  Time reports that Ed Balls is attempting to do something about it and warns against the media cult of "punish all hoodies!" Read the rest of this post...

This is the passage in Michael Wills talk to the ippr yesterday that Guy blogged in OK  - with the Minister's summary of the top line poll results on their opinion survey. He said the full survey material will be published shortly.  Read the rest of this post...

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): IPPR hosted Michael Wills, Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, this morning for a seminar on the politics of national identity as background to the Citizens Summit he is the lead for on a British Statement of Values. His talk will be published tomorrow. He produced some polling data published today by IPSOS MORI on the question of what identities give people a sense of belonging. I haven’t been able to find the data online yet but will provide the link as soon as it becomes available. From my notes: 80% of people polled have a “strong” sense of belonging to Britain, 82% of the English have a strong sense of belonging to England, 91% of the Scots to Scotland, and 95% of the Welsh to Wales. The conclusions that Wills drew from the data won’t surprise anyone: Britishness still matters. People still feel a shared sense of identity, he said, and there is a need, fuelled by globalisation and rapid social change, to belong to a “moral community”. The nation state is still the primary focus for this “yearning to belong”. What gives Britishness its strength according to Wills is that it is very much a pluralistic identity: it is compatible with Scotishness, Welshness, and – whisper it quietly – Englishness. Read the rest of this post...